PC gamers who want to make the most out of their graphics card often need to spend time fine-tuning a game’s settings. But is there a better way? NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience might be your best solution for optimizing games.
Game Ready Driver Prompts
If you’re the proud owner of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics card, it’s worth downloading the NVIDIA GeForce Experience app. While it’s not a requirement to play games on your PC, it can enhance your gaming experience.
One of the main benefits of GeForce Experience is its Game Ready Drivers feature. You can manually search for driver updates, or you can set the software to automatically notify you of them. These drivers are often released prior to the launch of a new game and include bug fixes and performance boosters.
When installing the latest drivers, NVIDIA GeForce Experience allows you to choose between “custom” or “express” installation. Custom installation means you can check the current and latest version of the drivers available, as well as see if other drivers, like audio drivers, are available.
However, driver updates are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring what GeForce Experience can really do to optimize your games.
Optimized Games in the Palm of Your Hand
One of the most useful features of GeForce Experience is the ability to optimize your game library at the click of a button. NVIDIA performs thousands of tests and uses its cloud data center to find the prime settings for your PC based on its components. You can do this on a per-game basis or ask NVIDIA to automatically optimize any newly added games.
You can also view independent in-game settings by hovering over each setting to see exactly how NVIDIA’s in-depth optimization can enhance your game performance. This software allows you to go much further than most games’ basic graphics settings enable you to.
The slideshow will display the game that you’re currently optimizing, making the settings easier to understand. And, if you’d prefer to adjust the settings yourself, you can do this by clicking the wrench icon to optimize for performance or quality. Here you can also override the resolution and display mode for each game.
NVIDIA doesn’t get it right all of the time, but it’s certainly a lot easier to optimize your games in one fell swoop. If you know what you like and don’t like, such as motion blur, you can optimize the settings automatically, then manually go in and change the ones you want.
Streaming Made Simple
Aside from being able to optimize your games, you can use NVIDIA ShadowPlay to record and stream your gameplay, allowing you to share your content far and wide.
While in-game, you can record your gameplay by pressing Alt+F9; this will record anything you’re doing in your game with the files accessible on your PC once you stop recording. You can choose to record in low, medium, or high quality, or pick your own custom settings. This includes being able to adjust the resolution and frame rates.
If you’d prefer to record for just a small amount of time, to capture a specific scene or action, you can also use ShadowPlay’s Instant Replay feature by pressing Alt+F10; this can be set using a predefined length between 15 seconds and 20 minutes.
For streamers, ShadowPlay can also be used to broadcast live to a range of platforms including Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. But, that’s not all, because you can add custom branding and personalize your HUD to display viewer count, comments, and more. So, once you’ve optimized your games using NVIDIA GeForce Experience, you can share your creations with the world for viewers to marvel at.
Screenshots Never Looked So Good
Whether you’re using Steam or another game platform, there’s always been a way to take screenshots in-game, so you may wonder how NVIDIA Ansel is that different. Rather than taking a basic screenshot, Ansel allows you to use its camera to take snaps of a wide variety of angles and then use the post-processing filters to create a truly stylized image.
From vignette filters to adding stickers, you can capture 4K images to show off your gameplay. You can open NVIDIA Ansel by pressing Alt+F2 while in a compatible game, allowing you to see everything that’s on offer using the overlay.
Using GeForce Experience
Regardless of what kind of gamer you are, NVIDIA GeForce Experience is a must-have for those that have an NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics card installed.
Not only does it take away the tiresome chore of checking for driver updates, but it also makes it incredibly easy to optimize your games so they can be played the way they’re meant to, taking your computer’s hardware into account.